Book review | Renewal or rupture? Memoirs about the division

As a member of a family affected by Partition, I have always been fascinated by stories about the period in India when demands for independence from British rule were suddenly joined by demands for Partition. That is to say, I have been reading about the freedom movement and Partition for years and have now reached saturation point.

But the second my editor suggested that I should Torn Threads: My Family from the Empire to Independence by Mishal Husain, a British journalist of Pakistani origin, I plunged in with a curt “Give me.” Why? Because whatever else the book might tell me, it would give me something I did not yet know: the perspective of the people who left India for Pakistan, a country that existed only in the imagination before August 14, 1947.

Although I started the book with the topic of Pakistan, I was delighted to find much else. Husain’s idea when writing Broken threads was to research her family history, and she was lucky. Not only did she have relatives from her grandparents’ generation to talk to, but three of her four grandparents had left behind memoirs of their lives and times. She also had easy access to several archives on colonial India that helped her fill in gaps. As a result, Broken threads is full of life, tells the story of a family in the context of the larger history of the subcontinent and presents exciting excerpts from the life of Indians between the 1920s and 1940s.

The most fascinating parts of the book, however, are the sections titled “Before Midnight” and “After Midnight.” Between her grandparents’ memoirs and her own research, Husain brings the 1940s and its relentless horrors almost vividly before our eyes, describing World War II in Burma, where her maternal grandfather Shahid was stationed, the famine in Bengal, the politics behind independence in both Britain and India, the narrow-mindedness and pettiness on all sides that made the atrocities of Partition far worse than they should have been, and the creation of two new nations simultaneously choking on blood and breathing the fresh air of freedom.

Until the moment Husain’s grandparents decided to go to Pakistan, they saw themselves as Indians. So why go? There are no explicit answers in Broken threadsBut the author’s description of the growing communalism in the subcontinent at that time is explanation enough. As a member of a family whose roots lie in a country that has been different for almost 80 years, I think I understand that.

Torn Threads: My Family from the Empire to Independence

Mishal Husain

HarperCollins India

P. 276; 499 Rupees